You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

In Praise of Limestone

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child’s wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad’s comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us…
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. ‘Come!’ cried the granite wastes,
‘How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.’ (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) ‘Come!’ purred the clays and gravels,
‘On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered.’ (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
‘I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.’

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A backward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature’s
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

To the happy memory of 800 African refugees, exiles by the Schengen laws, drowned between midnight and morning of April 19th, 2015.

The Wreck of the Deutschland

I Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead;Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God;Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height:And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? I whirled out wings that spellAnd fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

I am soft sift In an hourglass—at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall;I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a veinOf the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder;Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed;For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

Not out of his bliss Springs the stress felt Nor first from heaven (and few know this) Swings the stroke dealt—Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt— But it rides time like riding a river(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

It dates from day Of his going in Galilee; Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey; Manger, maiden’s knee;The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be, Though felt before, though in high flood yet—What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

Is out with it! Oh, We lash with the best or worst Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or first, To hero of Calvary, Christ,’s feet—Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go.

Be adored among men, God, three-numberéd form; Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still:Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll, Make mercy in all of us, out of us allMastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

II

"Some find me a sword; some The flange and the rail; flame, Fang, or flood" goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame.But wé dréam we are rooted in earth—Dust!Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there mustThe sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, Take settler and seamen, tell men with women, Two hundred souls in the round—O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessingThe goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned; Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessingNot vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind,And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snowSpins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

She drove in the dark to leeward, She struck—not a reef or a rock But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her Dead to the Kentish Knock;And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock; And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheelIdle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.

Hope had grown grey hairs, Hope had mourning on, Trenched with tears, carved with cares, Hope was twelve hours gone;And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a dayNor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone, And lives at last were washing away:To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.

One stirred from the rigging to save The wild woman-kind below, With a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave— He was pitched to his death at a blow,For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he doWith the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?

They fought with God’s cold— And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck.Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check— Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

Ah, touched in your bower of bone Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone, Do you!—mother of being in me, heart.O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth,What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?

Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine!— And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brineBlinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nunTo the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling.

She was first of a five and came Of a coifèd sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good!But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood: From life’s dawn it is drawn down,Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)

Loathed for a love men knew in them, Banned by the land of their birth, Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them; Surf, snow, river and earthGnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth, Thou martyr-master: in thy sightStorm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.

Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man’s make And the word of it Sacrificed.But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced— Stigma, signal, cinquefoil tokenFor lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.

Joy fall to thee, father Francis, Drawn to the Life that died; With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucifiedAnd seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughtersAnd five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride, Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.

Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales;She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thicklyFalling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling “O Christ, Christ, come quickly”:The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best.

The majesty! what did she mean? Breathe, arch and original Breath. Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been? Breathe, body of lovely Death.They were else-minded then, altogether, the menWoke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth. Or ís it that she cried for the crown then,The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?

For how to the heart’s cheering The down-dugged ground-hugged grey Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing Of pied and peeled May!Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way, What by your measure is the heaven of desire,The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

No, but it was not these. The jading and jar of the cart, Time’s tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,Not danger, electrical horror; then further it findsThe appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart: Other, I gather, in measure her mind’sBurden, in wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas.

But how shall I … make me room there: Reach me a … Fancy, come faster— Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she … there then! the Master,Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.

Ah! there was a heart right There was single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why;Wording it how but by him that present and past,Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?— The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blastTarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.

Jesu, heart’s light, Jesu, maid’s son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun?—Feast of the one woman without stain.For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.

Well, she has thee for the pain, for the Patience; but pity of the rest of them! Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the Comfortless unconfessed of them—No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous ProvidenceFinger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, andStartle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?

I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behindDeath with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;

With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark;A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen,The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.

Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.

Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls!Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

But I took my fishingpole (fearing your fever)
Down to the swimminghole, where there grows bitter herb
That blooms but one day a year by the riverside – I’d bring it here:
Apply it gently
To the love you’ve lent me

While the river was twisting and braiding, the bait bobbed
And the string sobbed, as it cut through the hustling breeze
And I watched how the water was kneading so neatly, gone treacly
Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat
—frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath

Press on me: we are restless things
Webs of seaweed are swaddling
You call upon the dusk
Of the musk of a squid
Shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, “THE WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND” (excerpt)

On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round—
O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

2.

Night is a perfectly put-together bitch.
Can never tell where she’s going or what she’s gonna get up to.
But we’ll all follow her around, breathless and desperate
Like the puny, co-dependent hipsters we are; propped up
by our mutually terrified demands of one another,
we’d all rather be somewhere else.
But you break down and fall in line after a while,
Or some douchebag dares to mansplain Night to you at a party:
She deserves to be every bit as cool and popular as she is
Because she is so nice to everyone, even the freaks,
so composed, so aloof, so sophisticated.
I need somethin’ to grab in the dark.
Blessed Oblivion! I pray to St. Shitfaced
May he give me boundless edgy, mysterious things to say at parties,
May we get laid instead of sleep, cherish these memories forever,
And never have to wake up for work in the morning. Amen.